Chapter 35

The sun wakes me up where I’m crouched next to the stove with a butcher knife in my fist. The way I feel, the idea of getting killed isn’t so bad. My back hurts. My eyes feel cut open with a razor. I get dressed, and I go to work. I sit in the back of the bus so no one can sit behind me with a knife, a poison dart, a piano-wire garrote.

At the house where I work, the regular caseworker’s car is in the driveway. On the lawn are some normal red-looking birds walking around in the grass. The sky is blue-colored the way you’d expect. Nothing looks out of the ordinary. In the house, the caseworker is on all fours scrubbing the kitchen tile with bleach and ammonia so strong it makes the air around her go all wavy with toxins that bring tears to my eyes. “I hope you don’t mind,” she says, still scrubbing. “This was in your daily planner for you to do today. I came over early.” Bleach plus ammonia equals deadly chlorine gas. The tears rolling down my cheeks, I ask, did she get my messages? The caseworker does most of her breathing through a cigarette. The fumes must be nothing to her. “No, I called in sick,” she says. “This cleaning things is just so fulfilling. There’s some coffee and homemade muffins I just baked. Why don’t you just relax?” I ask, doesn’t she want to hear all about my problems? Take some notes? The killer called me last night. I was awake all night. He’s picked me out to kill me. God forbid she should stop scrubbing the floor and get up and call the police for my sake. “Don’t worry,” she says. She dips her scrub brush in her bucket of cleaning water. “The suicide rate took a big jump last night. That’s why I couldn’t face the office this morning.” The way she’s scrubbing the floor, it will never come clean again. Once you scrub the clear gloss coat off a vinyl floor with an oxidizer like bleach, you’re fucked. When she’s done, the floor will be so porous, everything will stain. God forbid I should try and tell her this. She thinks she’s doing a great job. I ask, So how does the high suicide rate keep me alive? “Don’t you get it? We lost eleven more clients last night. Nine the night before. Twelve the night before that. We’re looking at a landslide here,” she says. So? “With numbers like that every night, if there is a killer, he doesn’t need to kill anybody.” She starts singing. Maybe the deadly chlorine gas is having its effect. Her scrubbing does a little soft-shoe dance to go with her song. She says, “This won’t sound appropriate, but congratulations.” I’m the last Creedish. “You’re almost the last survivor.” I ask how many others. “In this town, one,” she says. “Nationwide, only five.” Let’s play like old times, I say. I tell her, Let’s us get out the old Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and pick out a new way for me to go crazy. Let’s do it. Just for old times’ sake. Get the book. The caseworker sighs and looks down at me reflected with my face wet with tears in her puddle of dirty scrub water on the floor. “Listen,” she says, “I’ve got some real work to do here. Besides, the DSM is lost. I haven’t seen it in a couple days.” She scrubs back and forth, saying, “Not that I miss it.” Okay, this has been a tough ten years. Almost all her clients are gone. She’s stressed out. Burned out. No, incinerated. Cremated. She sees herself as a failure. She’s suffering from what’s called Learned Helplessness. “Besides,” she says, scrubbing hard, here and there at the last spots where the vinyl is still intact, “I can’t hold your hand forever. If you’re going to kill yourself, I can’t stop you, and it’s not my fault. According to my records, you’re perfectly happy and adjusted. We have the tests. There’s empirical evidence to prove it.” The fumes in here make it so I have to sniff back my tears. She says, “Kill yourself or don’t kill yourself, but stop torturing me. I’m trying to move on with my life.” She says, “Every day in America people kill themselves. The problem isn’t worse just because you know most of them.” She says, “Don’t you think it’s time you cut your own meat?”